{these (lucu)lubrications had made
[my] light a mere landmark
which opened up onto
the brink of * a declivity
slanting down directly
to a tomb * ancestral dignity
with all life lying in * the direction
of this gaze . . . while whereabouts outside
it [?] could not tell : some « region »
of science possibly * psycho

« how is it * I am here ? . . . »}

I
talk to
insects. Eco-Brutalism,

Deep
Semiology: the
doors to the

closets
all made
of vinyl … vapor … velvet … Velveeta …

What
should we
do so that

consciousness
of the
brain does not

purely
and simply
coincide with the

spirit
of capitalism?
Seine for mermaids

in
the Baltic?
Bathe in spicy

tomatoes?
Doubtful. Doubtful.
Doubtful. Beyond the

tightly
clustered streets
of the small

town,
half-boarded
up Main Street

surrounding
the single
tall spire of

a
church, the
road quickly turns

rural
(cluster of
mock castles, Consider this, for example:

A white dinner jacket should not be worn, not in the summer, not by the sea.

In most eukaryotes, a large proportion of the genome does not code for proteins.

And there you are my power has grown terrible
My anxiety also
My instability
I can’t sit still anymore
I search I become
I’m no longer my real age I toy with everything

If I understood it all I’d be very afraid,

with what strange utterance does the rushing air
blow though my floating head the &,

And finds a
Kind of ground, to practise here being grateful

like a thumbprint

For we ourselves are luminous. Except we do not give off light.

But we do know that August I, elector of Saxony, who boasted that he owned “a series of portraits of Roman emperoros\\ I mean emperors, from Caesar to Domitian, executed by Titian from life,” refused an offer of 100,000 gold florins made by Venice’s Council of Ten for a unicorn he owned, and that he kept as a precious object a stuffed phoenix, a gift from the Bishop of Bamberg. As late as 1567, the exhibition room kept by Albert V of Bavaria contained, in addition to 780 paintings, 2,000 objects of various kinds, among them “an egg that a bishop had found inside another egg, manna fallen from the sky during a famine, a hydra, and a basilisk.”

That said, “Clear a space around the self and do not let yourself be carried away and distracted by all the sounds, faces, and people around you. (…) All your attention should be concentrated on this trajectory from self to self. Presence of self to self, precisely on account of the distance still remaining between self and self (…)”. This transsubjectivation, conceived as a journey within oneself, is the product of a transformation. Foucault underscores the Greek word ethopoiein: “Ethopoiein means making ethos, producing ethos, changing, transforming ethos, the individual’s way of being, his mode of existence”.

There would then be a kind of transformation which would sublate the difference between the self and itself, which would create, produce a new self as a result of the opposition between two forms at work in the self.

Plasticity might be the name of this transsubjectivation. We would find in Hegel the possibility of understanding dialectics as a process of “ethopoiein.” A plastic subject would be able to transform its way of being. This plastic ontology implies of course a plasticity of gender itself.

Such is my interpretation of the relationship matter/form in Hegel.

OK.

So, the wounds of trauma are material wounds rather than merely psychic?

If we are able to admit that the difference between “material” and “psychic” is very thin and even perhaps non-existing, if we agree on the absurdity of regarding the brain and the psyche as too separate and distinct instances,

i.e., e.g., I was walking, among wet leaves on fallen / streets, the movement of light, of sound, walking past the / open door of a bar, the music [pounds] out, you hear it, all / the way to the corner. It gets dimmer and is finally replaced by cars,

a
joyful noise
through the flood

on
foot: moved
as silver net

over
our heads
went fire-shine

smoke,
in this
interpretation all category

variants
seem at
fault, a glitch

in
the fabric
alliance threatening certain

words
with overcoding
stimuli. It takes

two
days to
notice that the

EYE
tattoo on
my arm is

spelled
backwards. But
let E. kiss

with
the rabbit
the dew-struck

grass
in the
morning, sun-light

slapping
her face
Let E., foster

parent
of a
sparrow praise without

end
the porcupine,
Let weave together

the
cold breath
steam, to name

a
work for
its dissolution responds

to
an ancient
vision: — what reader of Spicer’s Language can forget his “sylabbles”?—

With flick o wrist
t’heavens
opened.

With flick o wrist
t’heavens
closed.

Let
beckon the
world to come

there is a new instantism > a language of tangent =
tanguage > ambient funguage > there is a modern path
>invented through accidental spontaneity +

Let’s call it The New Wounds

a transformation of the Heideggerian notion of “being-toward-death” in particular. Heidegger says that death is at every moment possible. Neurobiologists make us conscious of the fact that my own metamorphosis after brain damage is at every moment possible; there is something like a break of the subject which is not death, which is another kind of possibility. To be destroyed as a subject when you suffer from a concussion, for example, means that you become someone else. The possibility of becoming someone else at every moment and for everybody equally--for even if we know that certain people are more likely to be the victims of such damage, we also know that everybody may undergo this kind of destruction at any moment--this possibility alters how we conceive of the subject. The fact of being mortal is one thing, and the fact of being plastic means being able to be totally transformed and become somebody else. For example, Damasio will say of one of his patients: “Elliot was no longer Elliot.” So, subjectivity must be confronted to the risk of the loss of itself at every moment, and this loss is not death;

15.08.2009

New Release: Eileen Tabios' FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA, a book of previously-uncollected poems written since 1995. These include a special trio of poems from a summer spent hangin' out with Philip Lamantia, the poem "Pygmalion's Embrace" which is a de facto architectural plan for a physical poetic space she is creating in Napa Valley, her first (and so far only) translation of a poem into her birth tongue Ilokano, ekphrastic "baby poems", the poem "Justice" through which she achieved her goal of garnering for her wine cellar a jeroboam of the Judds Hill Winery cabernet by winning its annual poetry contest, and the series "Girl Singing", one poem from which generated 151 multi-genre responses or translations from 47 poets worldwide to create the anthology 1000 VIEWS OF "GIRL SINGING" edited by me, JBR, to be released by Leafe Press (U.K.), this coming autumn.

I post this because 1) Eileen's a wonderful poet and you should have all her books, and 2) the front cover image is of my arm. The tatt text is from Walter Benjamin’s “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“On the Concept of History”), Thesis 9. The background is a detail from Cy Twombly’s painting Autunno (no. III of his Quattro Stagioni), taken from the cover of the catalogue to an exhibition at the Tate Modern. And 3) maybe the blurb for 1000 VIEWS will make you hungry.

“Perchance,” as Hamlet says—he whose entire life and thinking are in a way devoted to nothing but sleep, to its shadow as well as to its shade (à sa tombée comme à sa tombe). Perchance to dream, that is to say perchance something of night passing into day, by chance, by misfortune or by capricious luck. All of a sudden, awakening finds close to it a scrap left over from sleep. Something was brought back from nothing, and in effect it is a configuration of nothing: scenes often colorful, with all kinds of tones, but whose dense coherency becomes blurred and quickly breaks apart in the acidity of day, all the more so in the fantasies or fantasmes of interpretation that, in the end, regularly and necessarily loses itself in the depths of that navel of the dream Freud speaks of to emphasize that everything here occurs before birth, before any distinction and any separation, any discernment of person or sense.

[…]

“[I
want] to
apologize for something

I
for the
life of me

can’t
figure out
what or why.”

Do
you not
yearn to lick

my
stinky armpits,
stroke my coarse

shaggy
hair, and
swallow the pus

of
my scarred
vagina? Sun, wind,

gamma
wavelengths, wind,
sun. I chowdown

good,
piss on
the grass, shit

razorblades
A-OK.
Not dried mud

flat.
Not dried
flat mud. My

neighbors
are dropping
furniture. My hamstrings

are
holy and
epic. ¿are you

the
signal ¿are
you a circle

¿are
you memorizing
¿memorializing ¿are you

materializing “I thought
I was paying
attention but my
ontology is out
of control.” “Is
that a dirty
bomb in your
Manolo’s or are
you just happy
to []?'fire
use in the
United States the
polt of thofur seal in
large ... at least
for man, but
tho most pleasant
for the fur
seal. ... Of v
there Is soma growth in Juuo
and July, ('OnSIStlIlg
pr '- of f;,
and of flowers
occasionally a ' violet . ....
of the snout,
behind !, then a
longitudinal cut, and
the ruin is
off. ... Did you
thick how much
there is in
that q Paul slid not do
tt fur serf interest, ... Accessories: Black 9mm pistol, .... white, light blue, dark blue, lime green; Eye colour(s): violet purple ... covered feathers, avian species, very fast, violet eyes, ...

The snouted man with violet fur.
Interlocking of species to form a being.
Children’s dreams hidden in pillows.
The eye of a wolf in starlight.
Avocados eaten by starving hounds.
Smell of waves on a foggy morning.
Trees in the shape of the smile of elephants.
Cracking shells of purple urchins.
BLOND BOOK CINDER HUNGER BREEZE.
INDIGO CHALICE STAR TASTE WRINKLE.
PACKED IN MY MIND LIE ALL THE CLOTHES.
IT’S THE MYSTERY OF THE HUNT THAT INTRIGUES ME.

There are waves
here that don’t
move. Who would
have suspected such
a thing? A
sweater built for
two? There was
only the one
cockroach, dead and stiff. As he
lay on the
pavement, I leaned
closer to him. His legs were
curled under his
body. His head was tilted at
a sad angle.
Sad? Yes, sad.
For who is
lonelier than the cockroach without his
tribe? We are
not free. And
the sky can still fall on
our heads. The
resulting performance wobbles between air-tight
and leaking, dancing
and struck, working
and slacking — a
momentum that refuses
to swoon while it’s standing, and
dissipates as soon as it ceases
into the into the into the into the into
the into the

into
the into
the into the

into
the into
the into the

into
the into
the into the

monks
were meditating,
and they were

facing
very funny
objects. I, then,

followed
strange white
dots into the

library.
I thought
that everyone was

giving
up but
I realized that

I
was walking
into an outside

of
silence. It
took me awhile

to
realize that
my group was

in
the bottom
of the courtyard,

reading
from the
statues, where I

joined
them. Slowly,
slowly, each group

moved
outside. Time
moved toward that

breaking
note, caught
in a rainstorm,

soaked,
dreaming of
choking, thinking about

her
heart opening
and closing and

how
a bit
of translucent poison

/ so often the ghost of letterforms, spermatazoa, calligraphy, “pseudo-writing” over dark green backgrounds, blackboard like save for the omnipresent streaking of the white paint, “Ecstasy so great that all Heaven and Hell become one Shangri-La.” “If it looks like art,
it's not good enough”

–why that silly wig?

the sun fizzles, pinched between
wet surly sheep

a sheep is a shoe, remember?

As a person:

Had several interactions, planning more, and also planning to put a roof on our cubicle.

As a thing:

In the supergirl outfit, I went to buy fruit to make a salad as a healthy dessert alternative to ice cream. In several fan fiction accounts supergirl and batwoman hook up. The supergirl cape is short and does not snag. What thing do we mean doing?

which
I read
as what do

we
mean by
doing?

- The essence of technology is nothing technological
- The essence of language is not found in human speaking
- The essence of dwelling has nothing to do with having four
walls and a roof over your head - The essence of pain has nothing to do with feeling. /

getting
to the
mumbling now. There is the shape of the stomach. And isn’t / The presence of a thing / That can’t be seen / More massive than the universe? / The massive spin-2 particle whose / Couplings at long distances / Are those of a fist-fucking anus swallowing a fist? Thrown I trace my journey as far as my place in the wind. A place. I don’t mean a space. Thank you, Dr Aue, for returning my wooden prosthesis. Like sand in an hourglass music falls over music. Toward the tin-cold and murmuring black wood
I bear a display case of blue light
say it’s the
Velcro moon
gold grommets
in Anaheim my thighs burn
on the vinyl bench
of the Impala it sluices
onto the freeway
Harbor Blvd., Anaheim Blvd.
Lincoln Ave.,
I was able to go through college studying poetry without ever learning who MINA LOY was, or BARONESS ELSA,

(“fellaheen”
“Tashkent” “Relax/
Stand at Attention”

“people
are walrus,
fuck ‘em”) “Things”

have
not suddenly
cohered; have not

suddenly
become a
vast unitary sensical

blob,
it’s still
all editing: of

fragments.
There is
no whole: only

continuity.
I need
bumps along the

way
to remind
me that I’m

interacting
with stuff,
my knee hurts

bad
where I
banged it on

the
bumper of
Sam’s truck. Get

your
hand off
my breast. (it

is
serious / it
is a joke)

I
choose whichever
response happens to

be
contextually convenient.
There [is] / a

sense
of / disorder
in / the air.

I
[can] smell /
a sort of

funk /
(and almost
hear / Buddy Guy’s

guitar
cry / real
tears). … But / what

the
hay. / I
adjust / my squirrel

fur
thong, / (head
in front/ tail

on
back), / put
on / sparkly stripper

socks
[my sparkly
stripper socks] and

and
and and
and. All of

a
sudden a
bull comes charging

out
of nowhere
and no I

wasn’t
always this
ugly. I used

be far uglier. “We are entering the era of universal subtitling” “Flight-lines, translation programmes and chains of heterogeneous elements articulate each other. Our universe becomes a territory all dimensions of which may be travelled both in time and space” “in search of the coy orb”

hello
am I
OK? Do I

want
to come
home? I hear

the
“… rumor of
[my] bare feet

over
the dust …”
of the impeccable

macroeconomy
of the
abandoned palaces and

huts.
A block
away large bulldozers

busily
demolish a
small grove in

order
to erect
a mass of

buildings
exactly like
this one. If

you
dream of
scissors. If you

being
old is
not so bad.

If
you trying
on a hat

in
a shop.
If you glancing

at
the wicker
nightstand. If you

play
marimba on
your rib cage.

If
you can’t
even see my

hands.
If you
two dogs stuck

together.
If you
the male lifts

one
leg. If
you not the

wooden
spoon. If
you when you

speak
to me
I feel my

blood
sliding. If
you if you

would
give me.
If you. I

don’t
know what
happens when one

lives.
The shoe
squeaks when rubbed

excessively,
it will
be better to

listen
to the
barrel-organ swollen

by
whews and
sighs, Descartes walks

into
a bar …
The vertebrae ache.

Here at the center of a void inundated by a shadow of flashing color, the necessity of the voice released by psychic automatism to find its body provokes the primal spark of dynamic movement while the great “negativistic hand” André Breton exalted as an essential lever of poetic vitality opens dialectically the window on the Heraclitian plane of “the hidden harmonies.” It’s sort of like when you fly from America to Australia and lose an entire day - somewhere - somehow - it just doesn’t exist - and yet it does - and so I want to know where it is. The first sleep, where the eyes are involved--gives one time to look around. I usually say that I am seeing myself when I am asleep, but don’t really mean that. I mean that I am first sleeping. Here the concept of rule begins to move beyond the obvious and to extend, as a general principle. Like water, the earth’s crust, mental illness, and knowledge, where is the true red, yellow, or blue? Who’s Afraid of Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives? I don’t know what the sound of a 25-mile ice shelf detaching into the Arctic Ocean after 3,000 years sounds like, but I walk out into the night with that seemingly impossible sound in my head. Even the cracks in the ground cast long sharp shadows. We live through it the way aphids traverse a rose. You will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one. Bish bash bosh. Off the ricta. No bliss more blatant than, clearly beaten by the stars, trying to underline a verb in a text without any: aaaa aaaaa aaaaaa aaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaah aaaaaaauugh aaaaaagh aaaaaahhhhh aaaaaaugh aaaaagh aaaaah. “Garcia Lorca stole poetry from this drinking fountain” (Robert Duncan, Caesar’s Gate). “Content never equals meaning.” Meaning = “frame lock”. It’s no mistake that one of the most hilarious interludes in this long poem is the meta-redundant, “And then we’ll go axeroxing! Axeroxing! Axeroxing.” A carpenter plays a xylophone with two hammers. A Marxist makes use of a burning palace for his “sensible reading lamp.” These are love poems—written by everyone to no one in particular. In a two-dimensional house the stairs are drawn of chalk. A flat sun holds dominion in the mirror, dear reader, and the basement is a theory. That is, they say, they suppose, as they say; on a clear day, for example on a clear day, they suppose. In a large room, in a very large room, with very large language in a large room; suppose it’s a clear day, and this is a very large room with very large language, as a conditional persistence of the room; unable to think of a thing without insisting this is a room that is large, obeying some secret imitation of a large room, in the momentum of large language, that is an imitation of a large room, as an imperative without a departure, with is a given, that is a word given, given in a word, much closer than we think, thinking in terms of a familiarity, that could be a proximity of familiar, and or a haunting familiar in close proximity, anticipating a future, anticipating a potential possible, the advent of the eventual. In the Liber de Ascendi et Descendi, one lie after another, informing you a bit about the translation process and how this process might maintain a stylized history-as-bitchin'-travelogue. The author, an author, asks, smittenly, “Are not dead birds mushmouth color, turning in this wind in rotation?” And then it was dark. As we scrambled for the car, it became apparent to me we had not brought a designated driver. It was my Rambler, but as I took the wheel it seemed to break off in my hands. I didn't tell anybody this; instead, I translated: We're going to have to wait here a couple of hours while the battery re-charges. Nobody challenged me. It was a perfect translation. Leave it in the ground. Adios, Busy Signal. O little beep beep beep. O. So long nothing about you means anything anymore. “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” A falsetto voice, a spare piano line furnished by Erik Satie, the occasional echo effect, a smattering of out-of-nowhere rolled Rs, some deep-throated recitative, a little Björk-like mangling of English phonemes, and, for lyrics, a passage out of Adorno's Minima Moralia. We don’t even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths—but. It is out of such dust that the annihilated It is out of such dust that the annihilated It is out of such dust that the annihilated. Birthed from and of. Without a center, vital energies flowing skywards and waterwards and sidewards. Aerial roots. Latching and pushing and moving and prying, but always always always. It was a beautiful night, I was in love. “That’s what it was, but I don’t know if I really said it, or if I was convincing enough.” I touch one lip with my middle finger. Consciousness dwells in this contact. I start to explore it. Often consciousness conceals itself in folds, lip resting on lip, palate closed on tongue, teeth against teeth, eyelids lowered, tightened sphincter, the hand closed into a fist, fingers pressed against each other, the rear surface of one thigh crossed on the front face of the other, or one foot resting on the other. I bet that the homunculus, tiny and monstrous, of which each part is proportional to the magnitude of sensation, swells in those automorphic places, when the skin tissue folds upon itself. By itself, the skin takes on consciousness ... Without this folding-over, this contact of the self with itself, there would be no internal sense, no body of one's own, or even less coenesthesia, no body image, we would live without consciousness, featureless, on the point of vanishing. Or not. The Mumbai Highgrove Stud Racing Syndicate owns a horse named Spinoza. Every evening after nine at least five people are staggering. Alas, The Bleeding Skin, The Day of the Great Pardon. Offering a bite of your

dish
is a
nice gesture at

home,
but avoid
it in India.

I
am an
ouch cube of

nerves.
I am
entirely fucked up.

[Note: Sources: the 4th in a series utilizing The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (Edited by Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman), Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance (ed. Ray González) (again I work both from the end back), and the eternal and, of course. Again includes a bunch of stuff via Silliman-links, 7 Aug 09.